Something About a Sunset
by Rhianwen
Summary: Elli misinterprets the situation most spectacularly. The doctor takes very vocal exception. And outside, the setting sun goes about its business, indifferent to the doings of these silly humans. Based on the doctor's yellow heart event.


Something About a Sunset

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Summary: Elli misinterprets the situation most spectacularly. The doctor takes very vocal exception. And outside, the setting sun goes about its business, indifferent to the doings of these silly humans. Based on the doctor's yellow heart event.

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Disclaimer: I don't own them, they don't like me. I'm pretty sure the people who _do _own them wouldn't like me either, since I've kind of missed the point of the games.

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It was a little-known fact among the good citizens of Mineral Town, but the windows situated on either side of the front door of Mineral Clinic looked out upon one of the loveliest views of the winter sunset for miles around.

From her perch for the last three years at the Clinic's front desk, directly across from the windows, Elli had seen that view in all seasons, and with hours of overtime fortifying her paychecks, she had seen many a sunset as well.

But there was just something about the view from that window, in the winter, that even the top of Goddess Peak couldn't entirely eclipse. Whether it was the angle of the sun in comparison, or the snow pressed into the cobblestones, or the chain link fences frosted by the snow into something delicate and lacy, like a fairy's tablecloth, she could never entirely decide. Maybe it was just the thrill of the familiar and loved touched by the fantastic and refined into something miraculous.

Whatever the reason, it was truly a sight to behold, that last flare of fiery golden light dancing off the glittering shrouds of ice and snow and transforming the prosaic mountain town main street into a fairyland of rainbow and diamond and wonder.

And it was a good thing she had the sunset to focus on, she thought, staring fixedly at the street lamp, because she knew very well that if she'd had to look the doctor in the eye right now, she'd have ended up in a sniffling heap on her desk, leaking a puddle of tears in every direction.

She'd already been blinking fiercely and gulping heroically at the lump gathering in her throat ever since she'd found him moping upstairs last night, offered to lend an ear, and not only been rebuffed, but sent him fleeing the room.

Her own ill advised little crush aside, she liked to consider her boss and roommate a _friend_ at least, and it hurt for reasons that had nothing to do with beautiful storm-grey eyes and thick night-dark hair and her increased heart rate when he smiled, that he apparently wanted so little to do with her.

But despite the tears that had turned her pillow into a soggy mess last night, the thing that had _really_ hurt was seeing him so _miserable_ all day. So when that pretty Claire girl who had been by nearly everyday for a season had popped in to say hello, Elli had been struck with inspiration.

_Oh, Claire! Could you do me a favour and see if you can find out what's bothering the Doctor? He's been so down recently, but he won't tell me what's wrong. I don't want him to keep stewing over it without talking to anyone, so could you try to talk to him? _

A perfectly reasonable request, but Claire had made a pained face and admitted that she was already late for a _plant-hunting_ expedition with Mary. Which was ridiculous; if she had time to stop by and chat with the _receptionist_, she had time to chat with the _doctor_. In no mood to smile and laugh in response to the farmer's good-natured urging to change her mind and come with them after all, she had instead fixed Claire with a reproachful look.

_Please try to understand how he feels about you, Claire_.

Claire had laughed uncomfortably and set off for the library, shooting a strange, quizzical look back over her shoulder at Elli. The latter, already peering so closely into a stack of consent forms that the neatly typed lines were beginning to blur, had missed this entirely.

She had likewise missed the exuberant bang of the door closing, the swish of a curtain brushed aside and falling back into place, and the noise of swift, light footsteps approaching.

Until, of course, she had glanced up for the time, and found herself staring into the deeply annoyed countenance of her boss.

Lovely; first he sent her packing and hurled her attempts to help unceremonously out the door after her. Then Claire went packing of her own accord as a preferable option to actually _helping_ the poor man; and now, that same _poor man_ was angry with her!

Not a big deal ordinarily, but on two hours of sleep and eyes that still felt full of sand, it loomed as a veritable Kilimanjaro.

She really should have stayed in bed today.

"Is—is something wrong, Doctor?"

"You could say that," he replied with a distinctly scary sort of calm, frowning until his eyebrows nearly risked swapping positions. "Did I just overhear you telling Claire that I'm madly in love with her?"

Elli adopted an expression remarkably like a very tiny woodland creature facing down a volcano.

"I—um—well, no one really _said_ madly in love…"

He groaned in despair.

"You do realize that the next time I see her, I'm going to be in for a nice, long talk, listening for an hour while she explains in far too many words that she _just doesn't feel the same_."

"Doctor, listen," Elli pleaded, catching his hands across the desk. "Even if she does tell you that, even if she doesn't feel the same way, you needed to tell her! I can see how much it's been upsetting you, just keeping your feelings for her to yourself, and the longer you hide it, the more painful it becomes. And you never know," she added a little too brightly, wincing internally at the swiftness with which he had yanked his hands back, his expression something like a man who had just been through several pepper steaks. "Maybe she'll go home tonight and think about you, and what happened today, and realize that she really _does_ care for you as deeply as you care for her!"

"So, in other words, you think that I'm incapable of handling my own love life, and you feel the need to handle it for me," he paraphrased flatly. "You're trying to play the good Samaritan by helping me find a nice, charitable girl who can put up with a man with all the social grace of a stump."

"No!" she wailed, by now sniffling in good earnest. "I just…I know how hard it is when you really want to tell somebody special how you feel about them, but you just can't make yourself do it."

She pressed her hands tightly to her eyes, the sensation of warm teardrops seeping through her fingers only increasing the intensity of those little hiccups. It was too late to hide it now; it was pretty obvious that she was crying, and she could practically _feel_ him staring down at her like she'd gone suddenly insane.

"May I ask who it is?" he finally asked coolly.

She blinked big, brown, tearwet eyes up at him.

"Huh?"

"I'm just interested; who is this _special someone_ of yours? I might know him well enough to give you some idea of what sort of footing you're on."

"Oh, sure, just _rush_ to get me married off and out of your way," she huffed.

"You were the one who told the first passing woman I spoke to that I was in love with her!" he exclaimed, perfectly calmly and with an entirely reasonable amount of wild gesturing.

"Well, if you're not worrying over Claire, what _have_ you been fretting and moping about all year?" Elli demanded, arms folded, one narrow ruddy-brown eyebrow arched slightly.

He sighed.

"Elli, I haven't been fretting and moping over anything."

She bolted out of her chair, both hands planted on the surface of her desk, glaring hotly.

"Don't tell me that! You've been miserable over _something_ since the middle of summer! You'll barely talk to me, Carter says you won't talk to _him_ about it either, and you hardly ever smile anymore!"

Tim took a brief moment to wonder if he had previously been doing a lot of smiling that he wasn't aware of. If the lack of said smiles _now_ gave her the impression that he was wasting away with some dark secret, he must have been. Anyway, there was something about watching that little white bow bobbing away at the small of her back that could usually bring his mood up a few notches.

Then, giving his internal monologue a good swift kick, he turned back to the little brunette, her anger already draining to leave her concerned and pleading again.

_Damn it_, he thought viciously. _She could clean out Fort Knox with that look_.

He sighed heavily amid the crumbling of his stony determination _not_ to reveal to her all the little insecurities that would effectively knock him right out of the running he'd just begun to gather up the courage to edge his way into.

She would despise him, of course, his sweet, cheery Elli, with her very clear ideas about How Men Should Act. But if she looked at him and saw a man utterly incapable of successfully conducting his own love life, maybe she already wasn't that far off from it.

"Okay, listen. I suppose I have had something on my mind for a while. Mostly, I've been thinking about my absolute lack of people skills."

Elli giggled, carefully looking anywhere in the room that didn't entail eye contact.

"Well, you know, with the amount Claire has been coming to visit, she obviously doesn't think it's a problem."

"Maybe not," he agreed tiredly, with a small, weary smile, "but I do. What sort of doctor is so aloof and detached with his patients that they give his nurse a more detailed summary of their symptoms than they do him?"

In an instant, her face was awash with sympathy, and she was inching around the desk to squeeze his arm briefly.

"Give yourself a break, Doctor; you're still working on it. And everyone's noticed a difference. You're far more approachable than you were, even last year."

He chuckled softly again.

"That's where Claire comes in. She's very good at getting people to open up. By force, if necessary."

"I wish I could have helped you myself," Elli said with a tiny sigh, then seemed to catch herself, and smiled. "I'm sorry, Tim. I know it's a change you feel you need to make, and it's selfish to worry about how it's happening."

There it was again. That strange pepper-steak look. She sighed, and hopped up to perch at the edge of the desk.

"I really am happy that she's been able to help you," she said, barely more than a whisper, fiddling absently with a nearby pen.

He took several nervous breaths, sternly ordering his heart rate back into submission. She wasn't going to laugh at him. She wasn't going to be angry. She wasn't going to turn into a big, green, slime-encrusted alien and devour him whole.

"There's…a, uh, much more obvious reason that you haven't been able to help me open up to people."

She sent him a big-eyed, confused look. He felt his knees soften just a little.

"There's actually been something else on my mind, and it's something else that Claire's helped me with, a lot."

"Okay…"

"It's something that she wouldn't have been able to help me with if I _had_ felt that way about her."

The beginnings of a deep blush swept across her cheeks. His knees softened a little more.

"She's helped me a lot with learning how to talk to people, and that's helped, but she's also become close friends with…the girl I _am_ interested in that way," he blurted out in a rush. "I feel like I've gotten to know you far better since you and Claire have become such friends than I ever did before she moved to town, and everything I've learned about you has just made me…well. Uh, you know."

"Y-yeah," she agreed on a soft murmur, her blush by now nearly rivaling the sunset. She hoped vaguely that he wouldn't hurt his eyes looking at her. Then, with a shy sideways glance, she smiled impishly. His knees gave out entirely, and he slid onto the edge of the desk next to her. "You know, _I_ liked _you_ right away."

Summoning up the last bits of courage that hadn't evaporated entirely under the blazing heat of relief, he gave her hand a gentle squeeze, and laughed when she tightened her grip against his attempts to pull away.

"So did I. Well, nearly. It was just…you know I'm not good with women."

"I know," she chirped, despite the dampness still clinging at her eyelashes. "I think it's cute!"

"Well, I thought you might think it was a little pathetic, to see a thirty-two year old man who could barely talk to a sweet, adorable, friendly little twenty-year old about something other than work without passing out. Usually, when girls are attracted to older men, it's for their poise and experience."

"Maybe I just like you, and your age doesn't mean anything," she suggested lightly.

His thumb stroked gently over the top of her hand.

"I know. I don't know _how_, when I can barely muddle through a conversation with anything wearing a dress that didn't come for medicine."

"Oh, so _that's_ why you can talk to Claire!" Elli giggled. "She doesn't wear dresses."

He tried repeatedly to curl his grin downward into a frown, and eventually gave it up as a lost cause to be angry with her – or anyone else – for anything right now.

"I'm sure that's why."

"Should I start wearing overalls?"

"I think you're good as you are."

She beamed.

"Thanks!"

"I'd miss these," he added, flicking one of the frills at the shoulders of her apron lightly.

"I-I like those," she agreed, watching him as one hypnotized as his hand brushed her cheek.

He tugged lightly at the little yellow bow at her collar.

"And this."

"Uh-huh…"

"And this one," he finished, reaching around behind her and stopping just short of the apron bow when the delicious intimacy of his arms nearly around her seemed to occur to both with something like an electric shock.

"Tell me if it's too fast," she breathed against his lips before closing the scant distance between them.

Amid the various things on Tim's mind at that moment – including, but not limited to, ecstatic prayers of thanksgiving to the Harvest Goddess; the vague realization that the fruity, cinnamon-ey scent that had never failed to soothe and relax since he had moved to town had been coming from her all along; even vaguer worries as to what Carter would have to say about this, and whether the penalty for punching a pastor would be grave if the man's gloating should become too much to bear – bringing things to a halt was notably absent.

Thus did the couple at the edge of the desk remained for several long moments, lips brushing together in occasional feather-light kisses, her hands at the back of his neck as reverent as his at her waist and in her hair.

It is entirely likely that they might have remained thus for several more moments, had the door not chosen the moment between _several_ and _several more_ to swing open and admit a rosy-cheeked, wild-haired little blonde, outlined in the fiery glow of the end of day, into the main room.

"Okay, Elli, we need to talk. I begged a few minutes from Mary, and she told me to go ahead when I told her what it was about, so I'm not leaving until we talk about—oh," Claire concluded in a tone of pleasant surprise as her eyes lit on the pair on the desk, already leaping apart and blushing guiltily down at their respective laps as though found in the middle of cleaning out a cookie factory. "Uh, never mind. I'll just, uh, leave you guys to it, then."

With that, she was gone as quickly as she came, pausing only in her hasty retreat from the scene of a budding romance to flip the sign in the window from 'Open' to 'Closed'.

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End Notes: Hee! Another inspired-by-a-heart-event story. Because I thought it was endlessly cute to see Elli be all sad and reproachful when Farmergirl rejected the doctor. XD


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